With the emergence and proliferation of computer systems, and the Internet, in both personal and business settings, electronic data has become the media of choice for almost all personal and business documents. In addition, consistently increasing data storage and transmission capabilities have resulted in the ability to create, store, and transmit, virtually any size document in any one of numerous electronic formats. As a result, more and more electronic documents are being created, reviewed, shared, and/or read, without ever having been put in a printed and/or “hard-copy” format. Not only does this help reduce the cost of creating and reviewing documents, it also significantly reduces the environmental impact of document creation, distribution, and review.
However, one of the unforeseen issues with electronic documents, and electronic document review, is that, using current document creation and viewing systems, when a reader/reviewer of a given electronic document wishes to refer back to a given section of the electronic document, the reader/viewer of the electronic document often finds they must scan through large portions of the electronic document to find the given section of interest. This is a problem for virtually any electronic document, but it is a particularly significant issue with large electronic documents, and/or complicated electronic documents, and/or professional electronic documents, and/or business electronic documents.
As a specific example, a particular definition of a term in the text of an electronic document may be presented in one section of the electronic document and then the term and/or definition may referred to at several other locations in the electronic document. Currently, if the reader/viewer of the electronic document wishes to re-read, or otherwise refer back to, the definition of the term, the reader/viewer of the electronic document must try to remember where the definition appeared in the electronic document and then scan through the electronic document to find the given section that includes the desired term definition.
Not only is the current search and find process described above time consuming and frustrating for the reader/viewer of the electronic document, but it also often causes the reader/viewer to break concentration, lose focus, and/or lose context. In addition, the search and find process described above must often be repeated for several terms and/or sections in a single electronic document.
In some cases, and typically out of desperation, some readers/viewers of electronic documents currently add one or more keyboard symbols to the actual text of the electronic document, such as an a asterisk “*” and then use a “find symbol” function to relatively quickly return to the section desired and marked with the more or more symbols. However, this process involves not only adding text symbols to the electronic document, which in turn requires an edit capability and/or permissions within the electronic document, but it also requires the readers/viewers of electronic documents to enter the desired symbols, recall the symbols used, then to implement/activate the “find” function and then re-enter the chosen symbols and wait while the system searches out and finds the chosen symbols. In addition, if the readers/viewers of electronic documents happen to choose a symbol that is actually used in the electronic document, the process only creates confusion and wastes even more reader/reviewer time.
These shortcomings of currently available electronic document creation and/or viewing systems largely result from the fact that, using current electronic document creation and/or viewing systems, the reader/reviewer of the electronic document is not provided a dedicated, simple, and unobtrusive capability to mark a given location in the electronic document so that the reader/viewer can return to the marked location quickly, and without having to scroll through the document and search for the given section of interest.